we deserve a soft epilogue, my love
by irishais
Summary: Nothing lasts forever, not even stolen happy endings. Seinoa, by the sea.


She comes to him in the dark, unafraid.

The path between the borrowed dorms is a short, straight shot; he learns hers as well as she learns his. They don't talk about it. They don't want to. It's quick, it's necessary, it's almost primal, the urges they give into, like planets orbiting one another so closely that the collision is inevitable.

The cool metal of her bangle never quite warms against his skin. It's a reminder, like the itch of the tracking implant in the meat of his spine, a bump he can almost reach, a concession to what keeps them here.

He goes to her in the dark, when he cannot sleep, when the dreams eat away at him and the monsters start braying at his heels. She is quick to greet him, to pull him into her room that bears no traces of anyone but a girl who didn't grow up in SeeD, surrounded by the clinical sterility that Garden imposes on its students.

Seifer trips over one of her shoes, and chases the fall right into her bed, dragging her down with him.

She seeks him out, in the dark, with the sound of a sorceress' scream clamped so tightly behind closed-taut lips that he has to kiss it free, swallow it, suck down the weight of her magic into his lungs where it lays heavy enough that he might drown in it.

He runs away with her, eighteen weeks after the war ends and his parole is an ink-dried signature on a paper he will never read, filed away in a steel cabinet on the third floor, her hand in his like they're kids again, bags packed, rooms left empty. They catch a train at 0200, and by the time anyone realizes they're gone the next morning, there's no finding them again, unless they want to be found.

Centra is dusty, desert-hot, the only refuge from the sun found beneath the waves and the night sky, rivers of stars flowing overhead as the sea rushes like a heartbeat over their toes, dragging their feet down, down into the sand.

He will not let her drown.

The lighthouse is still standing, dusty and unused for over a decade now, but his key still turns the lock, and almost all the light bulbs come on when Seifer's fingers find the switch. They scrub and sweep and clean, beating the dust out of the mattress, Rinoa laughing as they repaint the walls a sunny yellow instead of institutional white.

It is an escape, out of the darkness, and into late, languid mornings, warm afternoons, cozy twilights and evenings spent more often than not in each other's arms, planning for a strange, intimate future that for once, no one is around to tell them they cannot have.

The bangle never warms, and yet, it becomes as familiar as every inch of their bodies, something nigh-commonplace, until she asks him one deep-blue midnight to pick the lock, and he can never refuse her anything.

Her wrist is pale against the rest of her tanned arm- he kisses along the pulse-point there, and the bangle is forgotten beneath the intoxicating thrum of her magic slipping as easily into his bones as breathing. _There you are, I'd missed you_.

It's like coming home, like a promise he knows he'll never break.

He thinks maybe he should be afraid of that, but he's decided no one is ever going to see him scared and shattered again, and settles instead for following the line of her arm right up to one freckled shoulder, tossing the bangle aside carelessly for it to land somewhere beneath the bed. Lost, forgotten, useless.

Time slips by as quickly as the tides.

He comes to her, one night, and finds the bed empty, the door leading to the narrow balcony wide open and letting in all the sea sounds.

"Can't you hear it?" she asks, eyes alight and unfocused, staring somewhere far far away. "Can't you hear it?"

He hears nothing, other than the beat of the waves against rocks below, staccato drums that reverb in his ears.

"It's just the water."

When she looks at him, it is like looking into infinity. Seifer shudders, and blames it on the cold night air, rather than a knighting itching beneath his skin.

"It's the stars."

He has no rebuttal for that. She refuses to come inside with him, so they stay there, watching the stars and the sea and the lights of the ships far away on the water, until morning breaks with the cawing of a seabird, and the motor of a Garden-grey ship, pulling into the dock.


End file.
